consist of Irish Papists; and the feeling, compounded of hatred and scorn, with which the Irish Papists had long been regarded by the English Protestants, had by recent events been stimulated to a vehemence before unknown.  The hereditary slaves, it was said, had been for a moment free; and that moment had sufficed to prove that they knew neither how to use nor how to defend their freedom.  During their short ascendency they had done nothing but slay, and burn, and pillage, and demolish, and attaint, and confiscate.  In three years they had committed such waste on their native land as thirty years of English intelligence and industry would scarcely repair.  They would have maintained their independence against the world, if they had been as ready to fight as they were to steal.  But they had retreated ignominiously from the walls of Londonderry.  They had fled like deer before the yeomanry of Enniskillen.  The Prince whom they now presumed to think that they could place, by force of arms, on the English throne, had himself, on the morning after the rout of the Boyne, reproached them with their cowardice, and told them that he would never again trust to their soldiership.  On this subject Englishmen were of one mind.  Tories, Nonjurors, even Roman Catholics, were as loud as Whigs in reviling the ill fated race.  It is, therefore, not difficult to guess what effect would have been produced by the appearance on our soil of enemies whom, on their own soil, we had vanquished and trampled down.

James, however, in spite of the recent and severe teaching of experience, believed whatever his correspondents in England told him; and they told him that the whole nation was impatiently expecting him, that both the West and the North were ready to rise, that he would proceed from the place of landing to Whitehall with as little opposition as when, in old times, he returned from a progress.  Ferguson distinguished himself by the confidence with which he predicted a complete and bloodless victory.  He and his printer, he was absurd enough to write, would be the two first men in the realm to take horse for His Majesty.  Many other agents were busy up and down the country, during the winter and the early part of the spring.  It does not appear that they had much success in the counties south of Trent.  But in the north, particularly in Lancashire, where the Roman Catholics were more numerous and more powerful than in any other part of the kingdom, and where there seems to have been, even among the Protestant gentry, more than the ordinary proportion of bigoted Jacobites, some preparations for an insurrection were made.  Arms were privately bought; officers were appointed; yeomen, small farmers, grooms, huntsmen, were induced to enlist.  Those who gave in their names were distributed into eight regiments of cavalry and dragoons, and were directed to hold themselves in readiness to mount at the first signal.252